MovieChat Forums > The Thin Red Line (1999) Discussion > Much more "alive" than Saving Private Ry...

Much more "alive" than Saving Private Ryan


Even though I have a hard time finishing the movie sometimes, I find that this movie is so much more honest and true. Saving Private Ryan, like every Spielberg movie, is a mashup of cultural memes and scenes meant to manipulate the viewer in definite ways, and elicit certain reactions. For this reason it ultimately feels cheap and fake. Not to mention the inherent imperial patriotism.

This movie is just so much more centered in the actual day-to-day experience of life that each of us lives in, and that every soldier who died in the war lived in. Soldiers in the war didn't have hindsight to frame their picture of what was happening. They were current and alive for their time, no less than we are for ours. The madness and confusion that so many must have felt on the battlefield is the center of this movie, and if one is receptive enough to these subtleties, I think one can appreciate what this movie was trying to do. When bullets are whizzing by, war is not some idea one knows only through ideas that were created by Hollywood.

One scene that kept coming into mind is the scene where two soldiers die, and then the lighting from the sun changes slightly and a breeze blows through the tall grass. There is more wisdom in this one scene than all of Saving Private Ryan combined.

Anyway, those are just my somewhat half baked thoughts.

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While I disagree with your take on Saving Private Ryan, I do agree with your take on TTRL. Both are great films for their own reasons... TTRL is just a much deeper film. It's showing you the Beauty that can surround such a terrible moment in time. A couple of the deaths are with the Soldiers POV just staring into the leaves and the blue sky... The narrative really isnt THAT strange for a Current Malick Film(When I Say Current, I Just Mean Between His Long Hiatus.) Everything is right there in the film. Its about ONE major theme... EXISTENCE. The Life of ALL

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SPR is a 1940,50s war film done up modern. Thin Red Line is about life and death.

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Right on mate.

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Spielberg is an expert craftsman; Malick is an artist (though I don't always like the art he produces).

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Well said. Thin Red Line puts you right in Guadalcanal and makes you feel like your watching from the hills. One of my all-time favorites.
SPR was Hollywood formula.

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Have you ever been in combat? Have you ever really been in the jungle and away from creature comforts?

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Neither are as realistic as real combat, but that would be impossible to reproduce. As a veteran of 4 wars I have to disagree with you. Malik knows very little about real combat, his officers are bad Hollywood cliches and not representative of the combat leadership on Guadalcanal. It is not even good existentialism. It is vapid and overacted.

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nobody gets it .. ) lol.. Malick wasn't going for realistic military movie, but about much more realistic portrayal of what real human beings experience as this slaughter happens.. life-death, imprisonment in such a situation, how did it come to it etc.. questions that soldiers ask themselves but most of them are quiet and don't show it .. you being a veteran of 4 wars(being in "american wars" post-1970 can't trully carry enough weight sorry mate, but today US army fights with drones, blasts 40 ppl weddings for supposedly hitting 1 terrorist who might or might not be present at the wedding..

WW2, Korea, and Vietnam were last wars where US soldiers would experience any kind of emotional disaster that happens to a soldier in a REAL war.. after that US empire pretty much annihilates the opposition, ..

so unless you were in such situations where you have seen your close friends blown up, them begging you to save them, i see why you fail to grasp the importance of the movie.. might even think Malick is a commie who doesn't support the great USA.. so sad.. to see "such patriots"..

Anyway, this movie is amazing, its art in action..

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